Localizing the Internet manuscript – update

A number of people have asked me about my forthcoming ethnography of internet activism in a Kuala Lumpur suburb, Localizing the Internet (Berghahn Books). Well, after a long wait both readers’ reports are now finally in! The news is good: they are both very positive reviews that make a number of helpful suggestions for revisions which shouldn’t take long to undertake.

I am very grateful to both anonymous reviewers for taking the trouble to read the manuscript carefully and making thoughtful suggestions that will help me not only to improve this book but also to develop some of its ideas further in future projects, not least my notion of ‘field of residential affairs’, that domain of practice in which local agents (residents, councillors, politicians, journalists and others) compete and cooperate over matters of concern to local residents – often via the Internet.

After all, it is not uncommon in academic life to suffer at the hands of sloppy reviewers who clearly haven’t ‘got’ the point of the piece, or who write about the manuscript that they would have written, not about the manuscript they were commissioned to review. On the art of reviewing academic work, see Bruce Mazlish.